Bacterial diseases pose a significant threat to food security and are particularly difficult to combat because they contaminate agricultural fields.
To this day, biological control of these diseases is the most effective way to prevent them, but we're still learning how to apply them. Using other bacteria and viruses (phages) to kill pathogenic bacteria presents application and scalability issues. But the main problem is that the biocontrol agent must be thoroughly studied before use. After all, we would be liberating aggressive bacterial killers into agroecosystems that ultimately depend on other, non-pathogenic bacteria.
Ruben Olivares Terrones travelled from CIATEJ (Mexico) to Universidad de la República (Uruguay) to test two approaches to addressing this issue: isolating and characterising the active molecule produced by an antagonist bacterium, and testing the specificity of phages to prove they will only attack the pathogen.
His fellowship, supervised by Drs. Gabriel Rincon Enriquez and María Inés Siri Tomás, aims to develop safe, effective biocontrol inoculants that can protect crops from bacterial diseases. During it, he also had the opportunity to assist in other projects focused on genetic annotation and microbiome analysis, which made his stay at UdeLar very constructive for the future of sustainable agriculture.
